She begins with the brief experiment in Corsica in 1755, where a more democratic constitution than the American one was written on reused pages from old letters, there being no printing press on the island, or even fresh stationery. Colley’s range is displayed even more fully in The Gun, the Ship and the Pen, which disinters a number of constitutions hitherto quite unknown to me. The implication was that, with these props removed, the union with Scotland would come under threat.
Its author, Linda Colley, is a historian of remarkable range, best known for her prescient 1992 book, Britons, in which she argued that Britishness was largely an artificial construct, the product of a shared Protestant ideology and of the shared experience of war.
Why? That is the question which The Gun, the Ship and the Pen seeks to answer. It was in fact during Wellington’s lifetime, from 1769 to 1852, that constitutions began to proliferate. “I should as soon think of elections in an army or a parliament on board ship.” But today, every democracy except for Britain, New Zealand and Israel has a constitution, and the Israelis are said to be in the process of developing one. “A Constitution for Malta!” the Duke of Wellington is said to have exclaimed.
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